taken to the cleaners
21 November 2005The number 1 most productive thing I did this weekend was laundry. Before you get too impressed, please know that I had planned on doing it on my day off Friday (yet again, I saved up my vacation time for no real purpose and now have to burn it all before new years… I have no clue why I do this, it happened last year, as well– the closest I can get to explaining it is telling you to think about how you always pack at least 40% more underware than necessary while going on a trip… you dont have any planned reason to keep that much with you, but WHAT IF YOU NEED IT and then dont have it? crisis) before I devoted the day to lying around in the dark, half asleep, which was truthfully kind of awesome and just the break I needed from my stressful life of MTV reality shows and trying to figure out what occupation the person living below me has that has afforded them their intense schedule of practicing their awful electric keyboard skills at 2am.
I’m trying to get back into my sunday schedule of Church-animal shelter- laundry but, truthfully, have been doing none of those things of late. Mostly I just pray that there’s a Made marathon on, or I wait for Erin to call me and tell me that VH1 is showing all 8 parts of “Trapped in the Closet.” This sunday I bailed on church yet again (sorry jesus) but made it to the laundromat.
A few words on my Sit n’ Spin house of worship. (When we visited Seattle, Brendan took us to a place that was a combination bar and laundromat called Sit n Spin…. HOW has no one in new york had this idea yet? The place was awesome, despite the proliferation of Seattle hipsters. It was one of those bars that has the stickers of obscure bands covering the bathroom mirror, one of which was named “tuffy,” our family dog’s name. Brendan pulled me into the bathroom to show me the tuffy sticker, then upon exiting people started high fiving us because they thought we had less than pure intentions for that particular male bathroom, despite the fact that we have identical faces, vocal intonations, and DNA. Dirty bastards. Kind of like the time courtney and I walked out of a bathroom together and people started applauding, and I had to give them the what-for and detail exactly how pathetic you are if, while at a bar surrounded by beautiful people, the most exciting thing you can do is watch the bathroom and clap for people that went in there to discuss their respective dates and NOT to do anything dirty, you effing perverts. Get a life) I’ve been singularly faithful to this laundromat for a year and a half now (making it my longest monogamous relationship to date) despite the various aspects of it that totally Effing Freak Me Out. Specifically, that many of the employees have hair growing from places they shouldn’t.
I’m something of a body hair purist. If I had my way, everyone– EVERYONE– would be forced to get permanent electrolysis from the eyebrows down upon completing puberty. I’ve backed off a little on this and can tolerate body hair on dudes but I still think that hair is only acceptable in certain places. You take it out of its given position and it becomes disgusting. Like, a bandaid on your finger is not disgusting, but a bandaid at the bottom of a swimming pool is. Bandaid on a scraped knee = okay, bandaid in your sandwich = not okay. Likewise, hair on your chest = okay, I can handle that, hair growing out of a mole = I just threw up in a my mouth a little.
One of the women that works at my laundry place is rocking the hairy mole, BIG TIME. And it is in plain sight on her face, so there’s no way she’s unaware of it. If, someday, someone informs me that I have a hairy mole, say, at the base of the back of my neck, then alright that’s disgusting but it’s not like I knew it was there so it’s not my fault. But when it’s all up in your grill like that, you have to know it exists. And by being all up in her grill, that means it’s all up in MY grill whenever I hand over my pants for dry cleaning. You cannot help but stare at the mole. It’s just what happens. Like when someone opens a long forgotten canister of foodstuff and says “this smells funny, take a whiff.” No person in their right might would willingly put their nose into a weird smell, and yet EVERYONE does it when you request it of them. You can even get people to eat things by saying “This tastes weird, try it.” WHY would you try it?? Because it’s there. Likewise with The Mole, it’s there, so I’m compelled to look at it.
The Mole’s partner in crime is an agile man who was last seen climbing on top of a 5 foot tall washing machine for no apparent purpose this weekend. Though he is mole-less, he also throws caution to the wind in the realm of personal landscaping. Specifically, he has a 2 inch long cluster of hair growing out of the side of his neck WAY below the acceptable tree line for male stubble. I’m not exaggerating– it’s a cluster of about 4 hairs sprouting almost a pinkie’s-length out from the side of his adam’s apple. Why, why, why do this to yourself? When your “facial” hair can be trimmed with hedge clippers, it’s time to stop the insanity. If not for your own sake, then for the sake of your customers. Particularly Cristin, who constantly feels like she’s in that scene in the beloved and oft-forgotten Wayne’s World 2, where Wayne and Garth are trying to get the permit for their concert and can’t stop staring at the clerk’s pigment-less eye. “Well, we’ll just take these forms home, cross the “t”s and dot the…. lower case “j”s.” So it goes with me, as I constantly remind myself not to work hair, neck, shave, trim, follicle, or any similar words into the dry cleaning-based conversations I have to have with my largely non-english speaking laundry staff. It’s harder than you think.
Anyway, this is what I dodge when merely trying to wash by 15 different black turtlenecks. (I finally did the summer- winter clothing swap in my closet yesterday, and was sickeningly proud of the level of repetitive similarity found amongst all of my clothes. It is so easy for me to get dressed in the morning, you cannot imagine. I don’t know what you “colorful” people do when facing your closets). Despite all of the misplaced hair, my laundromat is bright and cheery, and full of people that look exactly like me doing laundry in their sweatpants and Greek Week Tshirts, sporting tousled hangover hair at 2 pm on a sunday. It’s also only 2 blocks away, and the fact that something in their water causes odd, crop circle esque hair growth has not been enough to drive me away. Yet.
Yesterday I did my normal routine of splitting the clothes between two washers then sitting and reading for the ensuing 30 minutes (Elsewhere, for you YA fiction types, is really well done and thought provoking, if a bit lovely bones- esque) before bagging my dryer forboden items and switching all others to dryer # 27 (in honor of my birthday). I then return to my apartment to watch the aforementioned R Kelly special for an hour before going back to free said turtlenecks from the dryer.
Upon my return, Neck Hair is folding items at one of the folding tables, surrounded by no less than 7 laundry-doing customers. I’m busy shoving clothes from the dryer to my bag (I don’t fold until I get home, there’s no sense in wasting time doing something that I could be doing in front of R Kelly) when he says “Miss?” I turn slowly, telling myself “Don’t look at the hair. Don’t look at the hair. Eyes forward. Everything is normal.”
“Did you forget this?” he asks, indicating something I left in the basket I used to move my things from the washer to the dryer over an hour ago. I look in the basket. It contains a lone Ninja Turtle sock.
And so I am forced to admit, in front of Neck Hair and God and all of the other Laundry Doers that, yes, that is my Ninja Turtle sock and thank you for returning it to me.
2 Responses to “taken to the cleaners”
November 21st, 2005 at 2:36 pm
really, elsewhere? i wanted it to be better. not that it was bad, or anything. but the way people were talking i thought it was gonna be crazy good. maybe my problem was that it was somewhat similar to the heavenly village by cynthia rylant that BSP published, but no one (besides those of us at BSP, of course) read.
i liked the whole looking down on earth through view finders thing, though. that was cool.
November 21st, 2005 at 2:44 pm
I loved, LOVED the role that dogs played in heaven. I really hope that dogs do prove to be that important in the afterlife.
Also proves my point that all cats go to hell.